Right, and both of those involve UX tradeoffs. Which was my point and why I gave them both as options in my initial comment. Having read the first half of the article, I was expecting the second half to address the issues which these various options raise.

Sure you can "Just save state all the time", but doing so involves tradeoffs. Tradeoffs which were not addressed at all in the article.

Your MS Word example is exactly what OpenOffice does when it's been closed without saving. It's really obnoxious. I was hoping to read some UX insight into how to make those kinds of actions less obnoxious without losing their helpful functionality when it's needed.

In general I agree with the core idea of the article. But it lacked useful discussion about the hard UX problems involved, opting instead for some easy in-application examples.